PRUG March Sum Up

Hey Ho! Another PRUG meeting has turned out to be filled with surprises. Firstly, Dennis - who has showed his uber activity during the February discussion panel - has agreed to Dawid's request and...

Hey Ho! Another PRUG meeting has turned out to be filled with surprises. Firstly, Dennis - who has showed his uber activity during the February discussion panel - has agreed to Dawid's request and...

Hey Ho! Another PRUG meeting has turned out to be filled with surprises. Firstly, Dennis - who has showed his uber activity during the February discussion panel - has agreed to Dawid's request and prepared a presentation. In this simple way a brand new surname, residing on daily basis in London, has been included into our speakers list. Yey! Dennis has encouraged Agnieszka, who has now officially became the very first female speaker in the history of our local meetings. Doesn’t it sound appealing? As this wasn’t enough, the next person who has expressed his will to give a speech turned out to be** Paweł Smoczyk**.

Traditionally, regular members of our community (AKA Friends - as after all this time we think we have rights to call them Friends already) showed up a bit earlier. The meeting’s opening was slightly delayed while we were waiting for the latecomers to turn up.

The first one to announce the presentation on Creating desktop applications in Ruby was Dennis Próchniak. Besides the QT framework and its version for Ruby, Dennis presented a library written by himself, which aims at facilitating the programmer’s work when creating applications based on QT Ruby. This has triggered a vivid discussion, mainly fueled by Aleksander Kwiatkowski, who has shared his experience on the subject with us.

Another presentation, which originally meant to be just a lightning talk, but due to some nice live examples and a heated discussion has been fairly prolonged was announced by Paweł. SaaS database design - as this was the speech topic - raised an interesting question of database selection for ‘the Software as a service’ apps model, while pointing out the use of Postgres schema as an ideal tool in such cases. The presented example showed how easily you can flip the part of the core application logic on the shoulders of the database. The entire presentation and the Pawel’s code is available here (yes, he had used a nifty scaffold: P).

Last but not least, Agnieszka Hemmerling has given a brief on Sinatra - covering the basic issues and the introduction to the language. During her speech, a heated discussion on the barriers a newbie programmer needs to defeat to delve into the world of Rails has developed. The general conclusion can be summed up by the statement that Sinatra seems a fairly good alternative for those who are creating non professional projects at home, as well as for commercial applications which need just a little support from the framework.

Once all the available drinks has magically vanished, the community members, as usual, moved to Johnny Rocker, where further discussions lasted until midnight…